Nobody would shoot the president, so they put him on a plane

Mutinous soldiers stormed the National Palace at half past five in the evening on 30 September 1991 and took Aristide prisoner. There was talk of shooting him where he stood, and nobody would do it. He was walked across the square to army headquarters instead, and from there the officers bargained with foreign embassies until they agreed to let him leave the country. He reached the airport by half past ten, met by the American and Venezuelan ambassadors, and waited among scores of jeering soldiers until a Venezuelan air force plane landed just before three in the morning. He flew to Caracas and on to Washington. Over the following days he gathered the members of his government who had escaped or who happened to be abroad, at the Haitian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Jean Casimir was his envoy there, Fritz Longchamps spoke for him at the United Nations, and the exile organisations in New York went back to the work they knew. Haiti now had two governments.

The 1987 constitution sent the presidency to a member of the Cour de Cassation, and the judge next in line, Gilbert Austin, was thought too close to the departing general to be able to govern. Austin removed himself. The post went instead to Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, at forty six the youngest judge on the court, appointed to it by a liberal justice minister during the years of the military council. Prosper Avril had agreed to leave office while refusing to leave the country, where he would have served as a rallying point for the right. American pressure settled that too, and on Monday at dawn a United States Air Force plane carried him and his family to Florida. Pascal-Trouillot was sworn in on 13 March 1990 as the first woman to head the Haitian state. General Herard Abraham handed her the blue and red sash and said that the army awaited her orders. In a white linen suit she told a cheering crowd that she wanted nothing except to serve the country. Elections were set for December.

The historical research department of the Nation of Islam published The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews in Chicago in 1991. Its claim was that Jews had dominated the Atlantic slave trade. Through the late 1980s and the middle 1990s the same claim was preached on American college campuses by Nation of Islam speakers, among them Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammad, who described Jews as bloodsuckers, and it was taken up by Afrocentric professors such as Leonard Jeffries. This happened as the alliances between Black and Jewish organisations formed in the civil rights years were falling apart. Jesse Jackson and other Black leaders denounced the charge, and historians of slavery including David Brion Davis and Seymour Drescher published refutations. The book did not go away. A reader looking for material on Blacks and Jews still meets it first, together with a supply of reviews praising its research.

Rara bands compete for the largest following, and the competition sometimes turns into a fight with fists, rocks, clubs and machetes. The hospital at Leogane puts on extra staff every Easter week to treat the wounded. In 1986 two bands, Rara Rosalie and Rara Rosignol, arranged a battle in advance. Two men were killed in it. One was the son of the president of Rosalie, the other the son of the president of Rosignol. The two bodies were laid across one another in the street. Five years later the bands were reconciled and invited each other to feasts. Deaths in Rara also breed stories that grow in the telling. More than one man swore he had watched a musician decapitated by a machete during a band fight, and had then seen the body carry on dancing while the head lay on the ground and went on blowing its trumpet.